The Best Backup Approach Your Business Should Implement

The Importance of Backup 

According to some reports highlighted in an Infosecurity Magazine article, nearly 50% of SMBs have reported that they lost data at some point between 2019 and 2023. The causes of the data loss included hardware theft or failure, cybercrime, data management errors, fire and flooding. 

But businesses don’t just need backup for data loss. It is also required for compliance with data regulations and frameworks such as ISO 27001 and NIST 2.0. We’ve put together a separate blog about the 8 Key Cyber Security Frameworks you should be aware of and explain the criteria required to comply.  

When it comes to backup and recovery you must aim to achieve specific recovery time objectives (RTOs), ensuring swift recovery for each application, whether in minutes or hours. The less time to recover, the less your business, employees and clients will be affected. You also need to define recovery point objectives (RPOs) to determine the acceptable data loss before recovery.  

The 3-2-1-1-0 Approach 

The 3-2-1-1-0 approach involves having three copies of data on two different types of media (for example, hard drives, cloud storage, and tapes) to reduce the chance of failure. You need one copy off-site (in a data centre, cloud, or tape) to protect against local disasters, and one offline (disconnected from the network) to protect against ransomware. You must also regularly test and verify your backups to ensure there are zero errors, and that they can be restored when needed. This robust strategy minimises errors during backup recoverability verification. 

 Furthermore, considering business continuity, we recognise that a single product may not always provide the ideal solution. Our licensing and cloud technical teams are here to assist you in ensuring your business can swiftly recover from any disruptions. Below are some examples of the brilliant backup and recovery partners we work with. 

You can also consider getting backup as a service, such as our Microsoft 365 Managed Backup, so that you can focus on other important tasks and leave the backup to the experts, saving your business time and resources, but most importantly leaving you with peace of mind.